North Carolina

Apologies for paucity of photos; I was asleep at the switch or forgot camera, or its battery failed -- so I will have to describe mostly with words.

These big boys are not colliding in Charleston Harbor.

Here is a passing shrimper whose nets we managed to avoid, and a few of the following flying critters hoping for a handout.

We entered North Carolina at Beaufort, at the end of a 35 hour, 207 mile, ocean voyage from Charleston.

We had planned for the possibility that it might take that long but hoped for a shorter passage. We were well ahead of schedule during the first day but had to motor sail most of the night and second day when the winds just died out.  NOAA’s 5 pm broadcast mentioned thunderstorms so we swapped the genoa for the small jib. No thunderstorms or other storms though we did see lots of lightning from under the horizon to the west, in the direction from which such storms come. We had waited for tropical storm Alberto to leave, and he took most all of the wind with him, leaving too little to propel us.  A big ocean swell was running however. We had a brief visit just before dark: a dolphin jumped clear out of the water about 10 feet off our quarter and the members of his small pod played with us until their shapes became indistinguishable from the black crests of waves. The most traffic we encountered was around the end of Frying Pan Shoal, which extends many miles out from Cape Fear. There is a passage through that shoal marked by a red and green and we probably could have made it through except: the chart plotter had no scale below 6 miles, the red and green buoys are not lighted, the moon was slight and the shoal was upon us at 1 am. So discretion won out over valor and we took the longer way around.  Once clear of the shoal I got about three hours rest while Lene stood watch. Having plenty of time before dark, we gave the motor a few hours rest and sailed most of the way into the harbor, during which a half hour of 18 knot wind came up and we were glad that I had resisted the temptation to put back the Genoa.

Our friend Dean, of Autumn Borne, had suggested anchoring at the old Coast Guard station at Fort Macon to the left of the wig well marked Beaufort Inlet. It looked good on the chart, but Dean contacted us by email, VHF and cell phone, when these came alive as we closed the shore. He advised that with the direction of the wind that had come up at last, this would have been an extremely rolly anchorage. So we ended up anchoring  at the town of Beaufort, off from the town docks.

Lene got a phone call as she was steering slowly past the docks of the marina on our way to the anchorage and all I heard was: “Is this a joke?” But it wasn’t. Bob, of “Pandora”, another of the 53 Saga 43s that were built before the company went bankrupt was the caller. I had helped him sail Pandora from Norwalk to Mystic last summer, as described in a posting to this Blog. Bob was helping another friend with two other guys sail “The Abbey,” a 55 foot sloop from Nassau, Bahamas to New York. He was standing on The Abbey’s dock, recognized ILENE and gave us the call. No joke. After the anchor set we lowered the dinghy and brought over a bottle of wine to celebrate our unexpected meeting.   The Abbey, Bob with Lene:

I had visited Beaufort last year while helping to bring “Sea Leaf” up from Florida and did not go ashore; Lene did  -- to deliver garbage from our two days at sea in the proper receptacle. We dined aboard, rehoisted the dink to its davit and got an early start the next morning – but not quite early enough: The bridge at Beaufort opens on request only once an hour so we had to drift for 48 minutes for the 8 am opening.   

     A short 38 mile day brought us to Oriental NC, actually to the River Dunes Marina, in Broad Creek, off the Neuse River. Oriental  is named after a bit of wreckage of the sailboat “Oriental’ which washed up there. It is the self proclaimed sailing capital of North Carolina. Folks say that they have about 800 residents and 2500 boats.  The Neuse is claimed to be the widest river in America, though certainly not the longest or deepest. Its width creates a body of water like some stretches of Long Island Sound for pleasure sailing.  We beat our way down the Neuse in heavy winds with engine and small sails. At the end, we furled our sails and headed directly into the wind using only the motor, which took as much time as sailing the zig zag, because our speed was so much lower.

Our reason for calling on Oriental was to see Bill and Sandy, who we met in Maine in ’08 and we had last seen in Iles des Saintes, during our passage south last winter. They keep their boat, “Lucille,” another of the Saga 43s, at River Dunes. It is quite a nice Club, made by dredging a channel to a shallow lagoon and deepening it, and hence well protected in hurricanes. They provide a free loaner car for two hours at a time: “just put some gas into the tank,” wifi, a health club, showers, and quite a good restaurant. They charge only $1/foot per night which is quite a bargain here in the States. The developer bought lots of surrounding land with the idea of building a community of homes, but the recession has put a hold on those plans. Lene had a bad allergic attack here, later diagnosed as a cold or flu of some sort.  (She is all better again after three punky days.) All she wanted to do was to lay alone in her berth, sniffle, cough and drink tea. Thus, on our planned lay day in Oriental, Bill and Sandy took me on a tour of the county, including the towns of Lowlands (the land there is very low) Hobucken (almost like Frank Sinatra’s home town) and Aurora, which was celebrating its annual Fossil Day. One highlight of Fossil Day was a free one hour guided motorcoach tour of the pit mine and plant of Potassium Corporation of Saskatchewan. They mine potash, used in fertilizer and a lot of other things, using huge cranes which they call drag lines, that drag up buckets of earth. Two cars can be parked in one bucket!  They skim off the top 60 feet of dirt (“overlay”) to reach the 30 feet thick layer of the sought after potash, use lots of water to wash it, clean the water and then put the dirt and clean water back in place. Monster dump trucks transport what the drag lines pick up. Our narrator had worked in the mine all his life, as has his dad, and his pure NC accent reminded me of my friend KC. Potash is the result of a sediment of animal bones and there are many fossils in the dirt and a fossil museum in town, where the festival was held, which we also visited.  Several collectors of fossils were displaying and selling specimens of their collections. The company spreads a few yards of dirt outside and kids are given shovels and frames with screening to sift through the dirt and finding tiny fossilized sharks teeth.  Bill and Sandy helped us with the hazards of the next few day’s navigation and provided medicine for Lene. They are great folks who we hope to see in NY on their way to Maine this summer. The cats were out on the docks all night, and Whitty had a panic attack when he jumped onto what he thought was ILENE, but in fact it was Lucille; he woke up the whole marina with his loud hysterical yowling, I’m afraid. Here is Alfie are after a hard night’s dock prowling.

Our next anchorage was off to port at the south end of the Alligator – Pungo River Canal, 46 miles from Oriental. We cast off at 9:15 and dropped anchor here at 4:35 with three hours of pure peaceful quiet sailing and the rest motor-sailing with the small sails. The anchorage’s marsh grasses provided lots of wave protection but none from wind and were the apparent source of the insects that we had to screen out; those that got in were hunted down and killed by Lene and the kitties.  There is room in that anchorage for many boats but only two others were with us that night, lots of privacy and room for lots of scope on the anchor to prevent dragging.  A brief heavy rain during the night, after Lene won the card games, caused us to dry out the cockpit cushions the next morning before getting underway.

The Alligator – Pungo  Canal was in the first 20 miles of our 69 miles to Coinjock. We had the sails up the whole way but the motor was on because with so much ground to cover we did not have the luxury of turning off the noise maker. And it was particularly noisy because the locking nuts that hold the cutlass bearing to its strut had worked loose causing a terrible loud rattle of the propeller shaft.  
Our first obstacle was the bridge over the canal, close to its southern end. This bridge, unlike all the other “high” bridgeson the ICW, is not 65 feet but only 64 feet above the water at high tide (and there is only six inches of tide because it is so far from the sea). The problem is that if winds have blown hard enough and long enough in the wrong direction, the water level can be driven upward, possibly causing the bridge to take off our mast. Here is an approach to a 65 foot bridge, not the one in question (which we were too afraid to photograph):

But the wind had cooperated, we slowed to a crawl and we were OK. In the canal the wind only got to us at places where the trees let it in, so it came in puffs, heeling the boat from time to time.  A brief heavy rain caused me to re-dry the cockpit cushions. A crossing of Albemarle Sound would have provided good sailing for twelve miles with no narrow channel to worry about, but darn: the wind died there.

We passed homes of people who have forgotten (or never learned) that the South lost the civil war. Confederate flag and rising sun.

We also passed homes whose residents, hawks, don’t mind bright lights at night:

And we passed some heavy traffic in the narrow canals:

I had enjoyed the prime rib at Coinjock when stopping there aboard Sea Leaf last summer and wanted Lene to experience it. I declined their featured 32 oz. hunk in favor of one half that size which Lene shared. The marina is one long seawall along the starboard side of the canal, as one is heading north. They had a mechanic with diving equipment which dove under the boat and tightened up the loose nuts and ended the rattle. The engine continues to hum but without the rattle accompaniment.

All told, four passages, aggregating  361 nautical miles, and four ports of call brought us from South Carolina to near the Virginia border.